


When the Road Looks Rough Ahead

by Anglophile_Rin



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Sherlock gets it wrong again, Socially awkward, friends - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-20
Updated: 2012-09-20
Packaged: 2017-11-14 15:40:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/516916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anglophile_Rin/pseuds/Anglophile_Rin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes was nothing if not resourceful. Somehow, however, he didn't always apply this resourcefulness in the ways normal people would. A pre-JohnLock fic in which Sherlock decides he needs to find himself a little friendship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Road Looks Rough Ahead

**Author's Note:**

> Written as part of September's JohnLock cgift exchange! More pre-Johnlock than anything else, written for the lovely dulceaphel on tumblr, based on the prompt "Sherlock attempting to make a friend before meeting Watson (preferably humourous). Any rating." A day late, but hopefully not a penny short, I hope this at least gets a giggle out of you, dulceaphel!
> 
> Title from the song "You've Got a Friend in Me" by Randy Newman - seemed fitting for the eventual JohnLock friendship! :)

Sherlock Holmes was nothing if not resourceful. Mycroft had first noticed this when his younger brother was just a toddler. Unsatisfied with the tedium of being cooped up in his crib until someone was ready to come and fetch him, he instead systematically put himself in life-threatening situations (trapped between the mattress and the bars, head stuck between two bars, tumbling face first off the side after what was an extremely high climb for a 18 month old, and even a quite creative and frankly disturbing attempted suicide by teddy bear until their parents finally gave in and set him on a small trundle bed on the ground bare of anything but a bottom sheet and his beloved blanky from which he could wander about his room at his leisure.

Mr. and Mrs. Holmes, of course, never believed Mycroft when he told them it was all deliberate, but they were adults, what else was to be expected?

His younger brother’s resourcefulness only continues from there.

When Sherlock was five, he came home from school covered in mud, the shoulder of his public school jumper ripped wide open, and a note from his teacher shoved haphazardly into his rucksack. That night, he was sent to bed without his tea – Mycroft secretly thought this was more for having soiled his uniform than systematically placing a frog tied with red string in the desks of every other boy in his class while he was supposed to be quietly studying his letters (all of which he had, of course, known since he was two).

 

At least once every few months, Sherlock would return home with yet another note shoved deep in his rucksack, citing everything from calling names to shoving to stealing sweets and handing them out during maths. But it wasn’t until Sherlock was twelve and had committed his first grand larceny auto that Mycroft finally made the connection. All the things his brother was constantly getting in trouble for were his own version of things friends did – Sherlock was actually trying to make friends. In his own, awkward and largely misdirected way. It probably would have been quite sad had Mycroft not been a twenty-year-old with an annoying kid brother. And, of course, if Mummy’s face when Sherlock had driven the Rolls straight through her hedges hadn’t been so very comical.

 

In Sherlock’s third year at Eton Mycroft was called in (Mummy had long since washed her hands of the boy and Father was out of the country, as per usual). Sherlock’s latest friend-making attempt had apparently led him into the seductive world of nicotine. While the endeavour hadn’t made him any friends, it had found him spending time chain-smoking in the boys’ loo – time which would have been much better spent sleeping, or in biology class.

Mycroft promised the Headmaster that he would speak to Sherlock – quite sternly- but gave it up as a lost cause when he received a face full of cigarette smoke and a biting remark about his recent (and quite minimal, thank you very much) weight gain.

 

In Cambridge Sherlock did manage to make a friend. A boy named Victor Trevor. Well, Sherlock referred to him as friend. Mycroft believed the correct term was somewhere more along the lines of “drug dealer” but, tomayto tomahto, or however that song goes. Unfortunately, this particular tomato pulled quite the spectacular disappearing act when the Yarders showed up.

Oh, how Mycroft yearned for the days when the Headmaster was the one calling him in to fetch his baby brother - far less bothersome paperwork that way.

After that whole debacle (and the rather trying aftermath of the cycle of addiction, rehab and Houdini-esque escapes from rehab), Sherlock was set up in a nice flat (well, a flat), usually drug-free and, yes, still friendless.

That was when he joined the knitting club.

It was truly one of Mycroft’s most cherished memories – walking into Sherlock’s flat (after the boy had refused to answer his phone for three hours straight), fully expecting to find him glassy eyed and drooling on the couch and instead being greeted with the sight of the younger Holmes, tongue stuck out in concentration and hair a testament to head-pulling frustration as he tried desperately to turn the largest knot of purple yarn Mycroft had ever seen into a jumper (or, Mycroft assumed it was supposed to end up a jumper. Even odds it was actually supposed to be a scarf or some socks).

No friends really came out of that arrangement either (at least according to an extremely grumpy Sherlock once he’d burned the last of the yarn and had started on systematically melting down every needle), but he did mention an older woman who was having some sort of domestic trouble that Sherlock thought he could help with, and could Mycroft lend him a few hundred quid to fly to Florida for the weekend? Mycroft never got more of an explanation, however, as the needles had started to spark and somehow the couch caught fire, and, really, priorities had to be sorted.

 

Apparently, the club idea showed promise, however, as the next time Mycroft came over, Sherlock was curled up (in a frightfully uncomfortable-looking position) on the couch (an afghan artfully covered the singed hole in the middle) with a novel held roughly an inch from his nose. It looked like some sort of fairy tale – at least, the cover was quite Snow White-esque, but it must have been something else, because Sherlock barraged him with texts at about three am that night rambling on about glitter-izing traditional horror mythos and textbook abusive relationships and the downfall of civilization as we know it, and Mycroft was quite sure at least two of those themes were not to be found in Snow White at all.

 

With one last go at the “club scene” (as Sherlock insisted on calling it), he joined NA.

We don’t speak about that.

 

The last instance Mycroft remembers of Sherlock’s find-a-friend mission, he’d gone out for drinks with a few of the Yarders he was working with (and, luckily, rarely being arrested by). From what Mycroft could gather from witness testimony and Sherlock’s grunted responses, there had been three attempts on his life after a string of slightly tipsy deductions, and no less than one divorce filed the following morning. One pretty young girl had to be deposited at home after shouting undying love under Sherlock’s window (she never recovered), and he may or may not have threatened to reveal the questionable sexual practices of one of the forensic crew.

 

After that, Sherlock apparently gave up on making friends. He could never go more than two blocks without running into someone who owed him a favour, but Mycroft doubted anyone would sit through an entire film with the man.

 

But, as is always the way, when you stop looking for something is exactly when you find it. This particular ‘it’ taking the form of a slightly shorter than average army doctor with a psychosomatic limp and a penchant for danger.

 


End file.
